Fast-moving N Korea plays for keeps

The North Korean nuclear threat is moving rapidly from bluff to reality, writes Barbara Demick.

For people with the unenviable task of deciphering what is regarded as one of the world's most impenetrable countries, the question of the moment is: how far will North Korea go?

Until a few days ago, the conventional wisdom here was that the foundering Communist regime was engaged in an elaborate bluff over its nuclear arms program, designed to pull the United States into a dialogue and extract more aid from Washington.

But the North Koreans' decision on Friday to expel United Nations inspectors and their declaration that they plan to reopen a laboratory where plutonium can be reprocessed for use in weapons suggests that they are deadly serious about making an atomic bomb.

"Their initial hope is to negotiate with the United States, but if that doesn't work or if the negotiations go badly and things escalate, they will become a nuclear power," said Kim Tae Woo, an arms control expert with the Korea Institute for Defence Analyses in Seoul.

The speed at which the government in Pyongyang is plowing ahead with its nuclear program has astonished even veteran North Korea-watchers.");document.write("

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From the time the North Koreans declared their intention to restart the program, on December 12, only 10 days elapsed before they removed UN seals and disabled surveillance cameras that had been in place to enforce a freeze agreed to eight years ago. Four days later, they loaded fresh fuel rods into their only completed nuclear reactor, a five-megawatt, Soviet-designed plant in Yongbyon, a secretive nuclear complex 89 kilometres north of Pyongyang.

On Friday, North Korea notified the UN International Atomic Energy Agency that it was booting out inspectors who have been monitoring the freeze.

"There is no reason to believe that the North Koreans will give the United States the luxury of time. If they waited, they feel they would be strung out and ignored and that they would be assumed to be too chicken to cross the lines," said Peter Hayes, head of the Nautilus Institute in Berkeley, California, which specialises in energy issues in North Korea.

The North Koreans' admission in October to US Assistant Secretary of State Jim Kelly that they had a plan to enrich uranium for use in nuclear weapons was cause for consternation, but not undue alarm because uranium enrichment is a slow process.

Their decision to reopen the five-megawatt reactor was more troubling, but again not cause for panic because the reactor will take at least a few months to restart and at least another year before its fuel rods could be used for bomb making.

The real crisis - and one which could be only a few days in the making - is the reopening of a chemical reprocessing plant whose sole function is to extract weapons-grade plutonium out of fuel rods from the reactor.

Given the rapid pace of recent weeks, it now appears likely the North Koreans will go as far as they can to produce a nuclear bomb or perhaps to add to an existing arsenal. The CIA believes North Korea had produced one or two nuclear weapons before the 1994 freeze.

North Korea's long-range Taepodong missile can easily reach Japan - as was evident in 1998 when Pyongyang test-fired one over Japanese territory. US intelligence officials believe North Korea is developing a multistage missile capable of reaching the US.

"They feel they are fighting for their lives, and if they are going to go down, they want to take everyone with them," said Cho Myong Chol, a North Korean economist who defected to South Korea.

North Korea watchers say the paranoid regime believes that the US is bent on toppling it and is seeking guarantees for its own survival, even asking Washington for a non-aggression pact. Pyongyang wants to negotiate directly with the US. The 1994 agreement that froze the North's nuclear program in exchange for energy assistance was a bilateral treaty between North Korea and the US, although South Korea, Japan and the European Union are also helping to pay for the program.

So far, the Bush administration has resolutely refused bilateral talks, saying it will not succumb to nuclear blackmail. US officials say the administration will refer the matter to the UN.

Daniel Pinkston, a North Korea specialist at the Institute for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, said that the US strategy was likely to accelerate the downward spiral of relations.